Ten Days

Ten days a wisp of smoke
from one ancestral strum to the next
distant guitar on the horizon
stark like a city sunset.

*
After she had already fled tooth-plated umlaut
of barbed wire and bayonet crusted with old blood,
of gas chamber door’s guard-dog maw
and the boot-heel scuff of bone,
of so many she had loved down to dust
across leather bridge, wind through a ram’s broken horn,...